


Dare to Know

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 06:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/619202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bite happened in public, and destroyed so much that Harry would have taken for granted just a little while ago—like public favor. But there was still one sanctuary open to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dare to Know

**Author's Note:**

> One of my Advent fics, this one for Enamoril, who asked for Harry being turned into a werewolf and having to come to Draco to hide from the Ministry.

Harry would have thought the bite would happen in a forest, with the full moon blazing overhead, the shadows shifting around him, the panting mouth and bright teeth defining reality for him. If he had ever thought seriously about the possibility of being turned into a werewolf, which he hadn’t.  
  
But it had happened in the middle of a Ministry corridor, when a werewolf that had come to the Ministry for Wolfsbane and already begun transforming as he sought to escape custody. Harry caught a glimpse of flying grey fur, the claws gleaming like silver nails, the gaping mouth—that part was the same—and then the fangs as they sank into his arm.  
  
 _Everyone_ saw it. Harry was on his way to a Ministry function, one that was supposed to celebrate the peaceful relations that had endured for a long time now between the wizarding community and magical creatures. He wore the heavy, gold-studded formal robes that the Minister had pressed on him years ago, and that might be another reason why he hadn’t managed to get his wand up in time to defend himself.  
  
In the way the circle around him widened the next moment, as people backed away—even though it was his _zero_ full moon, really, and he wouldn’t transform until the next one—Harry saw the way it would be. The pointing. The stares. The whispers. The attempts, soon or late, to cage him, to force him to register, to deny him basic rights, or use the threat of losing them to force him to stop speaking up against the Ministry.   
  
Everyone was too busy staring avidly at the changed Boy-Who-Lived to even capture the werewolf, who had leaped over the shoulders of the Minister and his guards and was rampaging towards the outer Ministry and the guests who waited there.  
  
Harry cast a Stunner after it, and knew from the collapse of a heavy body that he’d hit his target. Some of his audience blinked and looked a little embarrassed, but no one came near him.  
  
Harry saw the future, and he forced it to change, in his own way. He touched the Portkey fastened to the top of his robes, looking like an ordinary pearl button, and landed in a swirl of colors in his home. Then he took a deep breath, thought about the pressures that would fall on the lives of those who loved him, and reached for the book on life-debts that stood on the highest shelf of his study, the one he had always promised Hermione he would read someday.  
  
He would read it now. He would find out the provisions for seeking sanctuary of someone who owed you a life-debt, and he would go to Draco Malfoy and ask to stay in the Manor until he figured out what to do.  
  
*  
  
Draco opened his door, and stared. He had never really expected to see Harry Potter on his doorstep, and the sight made him rub his eyes, not because they hurt but because he felt he _had_ to distrust them if this was the sight they brought him.  
  
“I’m claiming the life-debt you owe me,” Potter said, holding his eyes. “You’ll know why first, of course.” He turned his arm, and Draco recognized the ragged wound on his arm. Hard not to, when he’d had Fenrir Greyback living in his house and seen him inflict the same kind of injury on people the Dark Lord wanted to punish. “I have a month until I first transform. I’ll find a place to go before then, and a way to get hold of Wolfsbane. Until then, I need somewhere to stay where no one would think of looking for me.”  
  
Draco stared at him some more. Memories of the year immediately after the war, which he otherwise didn’t like to think of, were returning to him. Potter had, after all, stood on his doorstep once before this, to give him back his wand.  
  
And Draco—  
  
Of course he had to honor his life-debts, that was something he’d always known, but it was the memory of Potter then, as he’d been, and the sight of him now, in torn formal robes, the autumnal light falling around him, face set in perfect determination, that made him step back with a nod and gesture Potter in.  
  
*  
  
Harry critically eyed the crescent moon. He could feel it pulling on him, the way he thought it probably pulled on the tides. His blood rose in eager answer, and he had a vision of himself running on all fours through a forest, his mouth wet with the gore of the kill.  
  
Harry shrugged. So it was a vision. So it was a pull. He felt that, and acknowledged it. It didn’t mean he had to _obey_ the bloody thing and go outside to rampage up and down.  
  
A knock came on his door. Harry turned around. He knew who it would be. House-elves didn’t knock. “Come in.”  
  
Malfoy stepped in and nodded to him. “Your contact came through. The first dose of Wolfsbane is waiting in a sealed vial in the library.”  
  
Harry smiled. He hadn’t dared involve his friends—he had sent them one cryptic owl telling them he was safe, and that was it—but he knew people from the Ministry who would do anything for money, and they had proved useful. “Thanks. I’m almost sure, now, that I know the location of that supposedly Unplottable property my ancestors owned in Scotland. I’m going to go there in just a week. I’ll be out of your hair long before the full moon comes around, Malfoy, I swear.”  
  
Malfoy just stood there, looking at him. Harry cocked his head. “What?” He’d told the truth so far, and even offered Malfoy Galleons he’d cleaned out of Gringotts to pay for his upkeep, although Malfoy had curtly refused that. Only with more extensive reading in the book about life-debts had Harry learned that compensation offered for the life-debt was an insult.  
  
But other than that, he’d behaved perfectly politely, and he would keep his word about being gone before the full moon. He didn’t understand why Malfoy was staring at him now like Harry was a strange insect he’d found under one of his collection vials.  
  
Malfoy shook his head, said, “I know you will,” and then turned and left the room. Harry smiled at his back and looked up at the moon again.  
  
*  
  
Potter had changed, and not in the wild luster of his eyes and the way that his hair seemed even shaggier than ever now, although he’d done nothing different with it.  
  
He was quiet, composed, thoughtful. Determined. That was the best word, Draco thought, as he watched Potter reading books and exercising behind a Disillusionment Charm in the Manor gardens and startling the house-elves less each day. Potter would have collapsed under such a challenge once, Draco was sure, unable to process the difference. Or he would have fled into his friends’ arms and railed that the world wasn’t fair. And maybe he would have found a way, as the Golden Boy, to change his fate.  
  
But this time, he didn’t do that. He simply carried on with his best attempt to make an independent life for himself—independent of all the chains the Ministry would have placed on him, independent of the friends who, in their concern for him, could have been targets. He refused the world the option to pity him.  
  
And as Draco watched him gliding through the corridors, watched the courteous way Potter inclined his head to him when they met, watched him read and absorb knowledge about werewolves and wizards in other countries and pure-blood customs so that he could live a different kind of life and not be helpless when he did, Draco realized something else.  
  
Self-confidence made Potter devastatingly attractive. Werewolf bite and all.  
  
*  
  
The moon was waxing, and so was the restlessness in Harry’s blood. It was good that this was the last day he would spend in Malfoy Manor, he thought, as he slid the books Malfoy had agreed he could borrow into his bag. He would send them back by owl when he’d finished with them, or, more likely, made or bought fair copies of them. Sometimes he thought that he’d never be finished learning all the different things he could in this new life.  
  
“How long do you plan to stay at your property in Scotland?”  
  
Harry looked up. Malfoy stood near him—nearer than Harry had thought he would stand once Harry’s werewolf traits started manifesting them ever more strongly. It wasn’t that he believed Malfoy had a particular monopoly on fear, but he had lived in the same house with Fenrir Greyback, and Harry was thinking more about the perceptions of people around him than he ever had. Remembering more about them. Trying to anticipate what they would fear.  
  
“I don’t know,” he said now. “Probably a few months, anyway, as long as I need to put together a routine. It would be dangerous to stay too long. I’ll go abroad as soon as I have a destination in mind and have enough research on it to feel comfortable going there.”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes, as if silently debating with himself even as he spoke. “You shouldn’t let them drive you away from your home.”  
  
Harry straightened up. “I don’t want to fight this battle,” he said, low and sharp. The bite had changed his voice, not adding a growl to it but rather a clarity, as if he could sing across miles. “I didn’t choose _this_ ,” and he gestured to the long white scar on his arm. “But I chose this life. I choose to live free, and deal with what happened to me on my own, without struggling with the bloody public who think they have a say in what should happen to me. That’s that.”  
  
“I mean,” Malfoy said, and hesitated. “Would it help if you had help in your battle?”  
  
“Maybe,” Harry said. “But Hermione’s version of help isn’t something I can tolerate right now. And Ron and his family still have enough bad memories of what Greyback did to Bill. Maybe, years down the line, I’ll want what they can do for me. But not right now.”  
  
Malfoy took a step nearer. “There are other people who might fight for you,” he said. “Because they want to, and in a different way than the legal help Granger would try to get you. People who know secrets about some of your opponents in the Ministry. People who wouldn’t try to make you into an example for all werewolves. People who—know what it’s like to feel despised and rejected by the wizarding world.”  
  
Harry did some staring of his own, the way Malfoy had been looking at him for days now. Then he said, “But why would you want to? A life-debt isn’t worth that much.”  
  
*  
  
Draco held Potter’s eyes. Wild, deep green as forests, bright as hope, calm as the future.  
  
“Because I want to,” Draco said, and moved closer, closer, closer. Potter was warm, not cold as Greyback had been. Strongly-muscled, graceful, poised like a wild animal. Getting close to a wild animal was dangerous, but it was the kind of thing that could give you a deep, breathless thrill as you did it.  
  
Draco looked into Potter’s eyes, and held out his hands, and said, “Because I dreaded the full moon not because you would turn for the first time, but because I knew it meant you would leave.”  
  
Potter examined him some more. Draco watched his nostrils widen and wondered if Potter even knew that he was using his nose as well as his eyes and ears to ascertain the truth of Draco’s intentions.  
  
And then Potter smiled.  
  
The smile was shattering, brilliant. Draco took Potter’s hands this time, and Potter didn’t move away.  
  
“You’re sure,” Potter said, with no questions.  
  
“I am,” Draco said, and kissed him, wondering for a moment if he would feel fangs against his lips.  
  
Nothing like fangs, but everything like hope, and wonder, and curiosity, and Potter’s tongue lapping like any dog’s or human’s, and Draco opened his mouth to the future.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
